on and around the solar surface

Danielle here! The Sun is a hot ball of gas and plasma. It doesn’t have a hard surface like the Earth so what does it mean to say the ‘surface of the Sun’? It simply means the part of the Sun we can normally see in visible light. Here's a photograph of the Sun in visible light. This is the kind of view Galileo would have had about 400 years ago when he made the first observations with a telescope.

If we take a closer look at the photosphere, away from any sunspots, we see that the surface of the Sun is in turmoil. Here’s a close up of the photosphere.

When we use a special camera to take a picture of the Sun in visible light, like the one above, we’re actually taking a picture of the photosphere. The first thing that strikes you in such a photograph is the dark spots - known as sunspots. Here is a close up picture of a sunspot. See how big it is compared to the Earth.